Battles
Gloss Drop

Tyondai has left and isn't coming back. Can you feel that he's gone? Certainly. But I don't think I can say that Battles have lost anything; in fact, quite the opposite. Although the band itself admits they had to work hard to fill the role that the good TY played, they seem to have managed admirably.

Loop stations and various gadgets scattered over the entire stage/inside the studio/in our heads. And the result is this crazy little disk. Is it better than "Mirrored"? Not by a long shot, but they are different creatures and each shines with its own light. It starts with the radiomodified melody coming from who-knows-what space-time of "Africastle," guitar riffs pop up at a certain point and are relentless and corrupted, and the good John Stanier gets busy with his Helmett-like drumming in service of a groove somewhere between broken and granite, "hc" and danceable. Everything and nothing. The cards are changed on the table, each track a different universe. Standing in, so to speak, for Ty in the first single released is Matias Aguayo, who pushes forward after tangling the thread of his voice over the guitar-keyboard-Emerson-Lake-and-Palmer-like Williams, is it a guitar? Yes, his words! The true Doncaballerisms untangle on "Futura", perfectly interlocking electrospastic loops and devastatingly played elements, grating melodies, obligatory bouncing!

Reminiscence of "Mirrored" is the sparingly used "Wall Street", close your eyes, you see the bustle of the frenzied brokers, the numbers scrolling on the boards, the genesis of circular guitar synthesizers in the minds of hallucinogenic trade, a pause, bells, wooden sticks, whistles, the brokers are immobile, but everything collapses in a second. Master Gary Numan decides to compose with pieces of gleaming metal the "My Machines", a bass fuzz runs rampant everywhere. The soothing hypnotic delicateness of Kazu "Blonde Redhead" Makino helps the endless loops create a path along the yellow-brick road of synthetic evil. "White Electric" is outer space that manifests in industrial grooves through W's six strings, and crashes onto S's granite chest, a desperate crescendo that opens into open sky devastations, up to a melody-for-children that puts us all in the cradle waiting for good night, the twisted and off-key lullaby of Yamantaka Eye on "Sundome" rewards us for the journey through illness, a distant dancehall in space, arriving softly to our bed, and we wonder if we will dream of the feudal-electric-noise Japanese boredom or a Jamaica drunk on synthetic fumes.